It was the month of his fourteenth year of existence, when my brother got his first black eye.  A reserved, timid fellow, Jeremy was certainly not accustomed to getting his ass handed to him.  Far from your typical schoolyard tussle, Jeremy failed to land a single punch at all.  Not in the sense that his clumsy inheritance had impacted upon him, quite the opposite,  but rather he did not attempt to throw a punch at all. Instead, he stood, hands by his side, while he was relentlessly pummelled by the boy.  He offered no resistance nor rebuttal to each blow, other than flinching before the crudest shot.  Even Marlo, being a child lacking in intelligence, was dumbfounded by the actions of the soft-spoken boy, putting his arms behind his back and taunting him to "do something" otherwise he was somehow a coward. 
Jeremy refused and so Marlo just went back to beating him. 

Marlo was, according to a teacher I had a particularly warm relationship with, dragged away by two of his classmates, and brought to the principal's office.  Marlo protested his innocence, even with the blood of his peer on his knuckles, arguing that Jeremy had been hostile to him and had thus, caused the altercation.   Marlo was suspended, because, as all persons of good intellect know, halting a boy like Marlo from attending school was a very effective strategy.  Such is the school system.  Jeremy was let off with a talking to from his tutor, Mr Phillips. He was, by no means, at fault for his beating, that is indisputable.  The discrepancy here is the reason for his such distinct bruise. Never a man of many words, vulgar or otherwise, the staff could not imagine that such a boy would be capable of bearing verbal arms, after all he was a child that knew the power of words, far more than his peers.  My so succinct associate simply did not have the nerve, not the nature to do so, and yet his assailant continued to berate the faculty's handling of the matter in a a rather intense fashion.  He held such a childish grudge that he continued to inform the student body of my sibling's so esteemed shortcomings, until the day of their exit, a fact that made me consider the young boy with much distaste.

When enough years had escaped us, to allow us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the details of that day, and the ripples it had sent through our visual cortex, and how we were unable to match the prior version of my brother to that of his present.  You see, the torment of  our family did not end with a schoolyard fistfight, the maltreatment ran far deeper than we initially feared.  He took such a brunt of force from his classmate that he stole not just my dear brother's dignity, but his sight.  His eyes had been jolted to such an extent that he could no longer witness the world around him.  Blood and fluid mixed with his tears and leaked like rainfall onto the polished floor.  You may tell me that such stains are easily removable, with a simple mop and bucket, but rest assured that school was never the same after that, the blood truly washes off a persons hands.  Truthfully, Jeremy never saw the world around him the same way after that. Sure most of it was physical, but a large portion of his outlook was of his own making.  Losing everything does have the effect of changing a man's perspective after all.  Most men of dignity would seek revenge, an eye for an eye and all that, but like I say, Jeremy was no ordinary boy.  Instead he retreated into the spacious confines of his own mind, in which he was free to explore at will, no unwanted curbs or stairwells to stop him from his descent into madness.

Staying in one's mind for too long is not an activity to be taken up with the faint of heart.  Living in the confines of ones imagination may result in the individual being unable to function in reality.  However without traversing the sculptures of the mind we would not be able to appreciate them, and besides, how would we ever write works of fiction in the sobering monotony of reality?  Literature is both the key to combatting madness and a product of such disparity. Without struggle we would never know courage, without love we could not grow to love.  But Jeremy was incapable of keeping his mind at rest, he had made the fatal mistake of allowing it to control him, searching for meaning in a meaningless world.

But meaning is not the same as purpose.  We do not have a meaning.  We are a blank canvas, no-one has imprinted upon us our duty to the world and that is both something to grieve and celebrate. It is up to us to find our purpose, in anything we can, or we may all end up like Jeremy, blind to the world in every possible way.